Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) measures what happens to a cohort of existing customers' revenue over time, accounting for both losses (churn and downgrades) and gains (upsells and expansions). The formula is: (Starting MRR + Expansion MRR - Contraction MRR - Churn MRR) ÷ Starting MRR × 100. An NRR above 100% means the existing customer base is growing revenue faster than it's churning — the business would grow even if it acquired zero new customers. This is the hallmark of a best-in-class SaaS business: Snowflake, Twilio, and Datadog famously achieved NRRs of 130-160% at scale, meaning for every dollar of revenue from existing customers at the start of a year, they had $1.30-1.60 by the end.

NRR is arguably more important than new customer growth for mature SaaS companies, because it measures whether the product is delivering sufficient value that customers pay more over time. An NRR below 100% means the business is losing ground on its existing base — every cohort of customers shrinks in revenue value over time, requiring ever-increasing new customer acquisition just to maintain flat revenue. Above 100%, existing customers become an accelerant: they expand automatically, reducing dependence on expensive new customer acquisition.

For B2B video production teams, NRR is the metric that proves the value of post-sale content. Customer success stories, product update videos, feature announcement content, and advanced use case tutorials all serve the existing customer base — and customers who actively engage with product education expand their contracts at higher rates than those who don't. When NRR is below target, it's often because customers aren't discovering the full value of the product; video content that demonstrates advanced capabilities and new use cases directly addresses this gap by expanding the perceived scope of what the product can do.